Given that this is the first excursion from Fly By Night Productions since Conor McPherson's This Lime Tree Bower was staged by the company in 1998, it should come as no surprise that Colin O'Connor's eighth play is a very darkly-rollicking monologue, a deeply irreverent and highly slapstick piece of hilarious story-telling which is emphatically not for the children or the elderly maiden aunt.
Your original Fallen Angel has got wind of a soul who may be coming hellwards very shortly. Being more than a little fed up with the quality of God's supposed mercy which has left Him alone in heaven and everyone else in hell, he has borrowed the body of a lissom young female to come and tell us, for the record, the details of just how The Mooch came to shuffle off his mortal coil. He has headed down to that world which has none of your supposed glowing coals or eternal fires but is a dreary and damp place because of all the remorseful tears of its eternal inhabitants.
The Mooch was a spectacularly inept heroin addict (born 1975, Dublin, both parents boozers) all of whose elaborate plans to feed his habit go spectacularly wrong. Our fallen-angel narrator believes that God has set him up for the ultimate fall, paying great attention to detail in the set-up.
And so we hear, over the course of an action-packed 75 minutes, uninterrupted by an interval, of how the Mooch's ambitious final plan goes disastrously and very violently astray, until he ends up hanging himself in a Garda cell with his shoelaces. Valerie Spelman is the wicked narrator - a spectacularly varied performance milking every disaster for every laugh it's worth - who simply feels sorry for the poor young Mooch who never stood a chance.
The author's words are colourful, coarse and very precise when describing incident, and sometimes richly layered, and his direction of the piece and the performance leaves very few minutes for reflection. And if God comes off worst in the breakneck tale, well, that's what was intended.
Runs until June 17th. Booking (01) 872 9977.
